


Although We Are Miles Apart

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [8]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Consensual Touching, Rape Aftermath, Sperm Harvesting, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-08 23:07:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12874992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: This is not how Steve had planned to spend their first Christmas as a couple.





	Although We Are Miles Apart

**Author's Note:**

> This was intended as a lighthearted holiday fic, but I think the ongoing tidal wave of revelations regarding sexual harassment, assault, and abuse has worked its way into most parts of my life. This story examines what happens when a man who relies, in part, on his physical strength is rendered powerless to stop a woman from taking something away from him that doesn't belong to her and that he reasonably fears he might never get back. I didn't set out to write this particular version of events--it happened quite organically--but when the words came, I couldn't not let the story tell itself.
> 
> TL;DR, there are lots of triggers here, so please be kind to yourself and skip this story if it's going to hurt you. It shouldn't interfere with the rest of the series if you overlook this one.
> 
> Also, the title is taken from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's marvelous "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

“Hey,” Steve said, quietly because he was staking out a mark and didn’t want to have to explain to Fury how he blew six weeks of satellite surveillance and another two of close contact work because he had to call his boyfriend.

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

The SAT phone attenuated Tony’s voice, stretching it somehow farther away than the thousands of miles that separated them. There was a howling absence, a sense of unbridgeable space, in the quiet between words that squeezed Steve’s heart until it hurt.

“Tone,” he said, half chiding, half pleading. 

“Did you need something, Captain Rogers?”

“Tony, please.”

“Please what? I’m a busy man. Places to go, women to flatter, men to stun with my wit and beauty. The holidays, right? Who has time for small talk?”

“I wanted to hear your voice.”

“Oh, well, you have recording capabilities there in the land of jobs-you-never-should-have-taken, don’t you? Save this for later, listen to it when you’re done playing Boy Scout in that godforsaken, pointlessly violent hellhole.”

“Tony, we’re trying to prevent a military coup and save a clan from being wiped out.”

Tony’s answering snort sounded no less snarky for being stretched over 6000 miles.

“You’re there because Fury wants something and won’t tell you what it is.”

They’d had this discussion already, had it several times, in fact, at least a half dozen before Tony had hacked S.H.I.E.L.D.’s “secure” server and found out where Steve was going for Christmas and at least as many times since, the latter always over the SAT phone and always ending the same way.

“It doesn’t matter how I got here, Tony. I have to see the mission through. You know that.”

Tony did. And Steve knew that Tony knew it. Steve also knew that Tony was pissed because Steve knew that Tony knew it. 

It was like eighth grade all over again…if eighth grade had included neurotoxins, Libyan terrorists, and a hell of a lot of sand in uncomfortable places.

“You couldn’t have made the suit sand-proof while you were at it?” Steve asked, trying to get the conversation onto a safer track.

Tony, however, wasn’t interested in being diverted. 

“You don’t belong on this bush league mission.”

Which, while true, had no remaining relevance, given current circumstances.

What had been initially sold to Steve as a simple rescue mission—protecting a shrinking clan of ancient Berbers—had grown into a much more complicated cat-and-mouse game, leading Steve and three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to watching a former Libyan chemical weapons bunker for signs of renewed production. So far, the evidence suggested that Steve was going to be there well into the New Year.

The fact that he was there at all had been enough of a problem for him and Tony.

The fact that Steve wouldn’t come home when he discovered that Fury had been playing fast and loose with the truth—again—had caused more significant difficulties.

He had a feeling that if he was there much longer, he might not have a relationship to return home to.

It’s not like Tony didn’t have a point. Steve had experienced enough of Fury’s manipulative bullshit on his own that he should have known better in this case. But as it happened, while Fury had massaged the truth to get Steve on board, he hadn’t been manufacturing everything.

There was actually a Berber clan who were being systematically annihilated by the paramilitary troops guarding the suspected weapons bunker, and as said paramilitary was planning to use their new toys to take over the government of neighboring Tunisia, Steve really was trying to avert a military coup.

But Tony wasn’t wrong about Fury’s ulterior motive, either. Of the three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with him, Steve had noticed that only Ortiz bothered making eye contact or small talk with him, and it might be his imagination, but it seemed like Ortiz always looked a little ashamed of himself when he did so.

The other two, seasoned field agents both, didn’t bother to pretend that Steve wasn’t a problem for them. They clearly would have preferred to be working without the oversight of Captain America. This state of things was driven home only a few days into the mission, when they’d still been in Tripoli gathering intel.

Asherwald, the senior field agent, had asked Steve to stake out a nearby hotel, looking for a potential informant known only by his diminutive stature and a decided stoop to his left shoulder. 

Steve had been game, though bored—how did Clint do this for days on end?—for three days before he’d figured out that he was being kept out of the way.

Then he’d turned his recon skills to surveilling his own people, though it made him feel a little dirty to do so.

What he’d discovered was that Fury had a secondary mission running parallel to and just beneath the surface of the official mission. From what Steve had been able to discover—information Tony had gloatingly expanded on for him later—they were really in Libya to flush out a notorious scientist who was obsessed with proving her theory of eugenics by manipulating the DNA of people with seemingly extra-human powers.

People like Steve.

That Dr. Mazik’s experiments on human subjects was an egregious violation of every international standard of medicine, science, or law accounted for the fact that she ran her operation out of an outdated chemical weapons bunker.

That she was dangerous was suggested by the way Ortiz looked at Steve when he thought Steve wasn’t looking back—a little worried, a little guilty, and a lot nervous.

“You’re bait!” Tony said, also not for the first time.

And Steve had to admit that he was.

But it didn’t change the fact that the Ma’loula clan needed protection nor that the chemical weapons being developed at the bunker—a deadly smokescreen for Dr. Mazik’s deadlier experiments—were a serious threat to the people of both that region and, potentially, of Tunis as well.

No, he had to stay.

“You know why I have to stay, Tony.”

“Fine, whatever. Do what you want. I hope you get scorpions in your stocking.”

Christmas was four days away, and Steve had good news for Tony on that count—if he could get the mission done quickly and manage all the variables just right, he might actually be home for the holidays.

Since Asherwald had delivered to Steve their plan for apprehending the bad doctor just that morning and said plan mostly involved making Steve a vulnerable target and allowing her to capture him, he didn’t think it functioned as a very strong defense against Tony’s understandable disappointment and anger, so he refrained from sharing his news.

Even to himself, Steve wouldn’t quite admit that this was a maybe-farewell phone call. That kind of thinking got a guy killed. 

“I love you,” he said then, somewhat wryly, given Tony’s last wish for Steve, but no less genuine. 

“Oh, god, what’s the matter? Are you dying? Have you been gassed with a slow-acting neurotoxin? Or are you about to do something monumentally selfless and intensely stupid?”

Steve was still flailing around in his head for an answer that wouldn’t be an outright lie when Tony squawked, “You are! Jesus Christ, you are going to do something massively stupid, aren’t you?”

“I love you,” was his only defense, so Steve kept repeating it, through Tony’s increasingly frenetic diatribe and after, when Tony sputtered to a stunned, empty silence. Steve ached with that silence, feeling even more profoundly the space between them. “Don’t hate me,” he whispered, wishing he could just chuck the whole damned mess and go home.

And then the lights went out.

Groaning into consciousness with a knife in his skull and what felt like an elephant doing the tango on his bladder, Steve realized what had actually happened. As it was almost routine by now to find himself in a state of abduction, Steve skipped outrage and confusion and went right to tired resignation.

Sighing at the discovery that he was being brutally jostled in the capped bed of a pickup, bound hand and foot with what felt like ten-gauge steel cable and chained to a U-bolt in the floor, Steve let himself be moved by the motion of the truck and expanded his senses to discern what he could from the world outside of his uncomfortable, moving prison.

Tire noise drowned out all but the most insistent of external sounds, so he listened to the tires instead, noting when the whine changed to a hollow, rhythmic thumping that indicated a bridge or culvert crossing. Twice the quality of the sound changed, reverberating back on him, suggesting a tunnel or underpass or the narrowing of the road between high cliffs.

He didn’t know the geography of Libya well enough to discern where they were going, but he did his best to estimate distances, though of course, not knowing how long he’d been unconscious, the math didn’t do him much practical good. It did keep his mind off of Tony, however, and how frantic he must have been to have lost contact with Steve like that.

That train of thought led down a pretty dark track as Steve considered how it had been possible for the bad guys to have gotten the jump on him when Ortiz, Asherwald, and Okeke were supposed to be watching his back. The plan wasn’t to have been put into play until 0100 the next morning. Either his team had been taken out or…

“Shit,” he muttered to himself, trying not to think too hard about the possibility that he’d been double-crossed.

If he died on this mission, Tony was going to kill him.

“Okay, Cap, looks like you’re on your own,” he said then, wishing his voice didn’t sound so weak and thin bouncing around the back of the truck. He stopped talking so he wouldn’t have to hear himself anymore and set about figuring out how to get free of the cable.

Unfortunately, though he was able to tune out his ferocious need to pee and the myriad bruises he felt blooming on his abused body, Steve was unable to marshal the strength to break the cable. Given his usual level of accomplishment where such necessary feats were concerned, this roused in Steve a frisson of unease.

He felt more uneasy when he noted that the chafing of the cable against his wrists seemed to be drawing an inordinate amount of blood, all out of proportion with what was typically—for Steve, anyway—a flesh wound.

He was made ultimately uneasy by the nagging sense that he couldn’t quite take a full breath, which he first attributed to panic—not his usual response to stress—and then realized was growing in degree.

As he began to feel woozy and lightheaded, Steve wondered what he’d been dosed with, that thought followed by a vague idea that Bruce would’ve been a big help right about then, followed shortly thereafter by nothing.

When he woke for a second time, he was no longer chained to the bed of a moving truck, but that was about all he could say for his new circumstances.

Strapped to a cold metal slab, pierced by an overhead light that threw the rest of the room into blackness, and alarmed by the stentorian breathing it took him too long to figure out was his own, Steve couldn’t say he felt much by way of relief.

As he heard echoing footsteps growing nearer, he tried to pull his thoughts together, but his brain felt packed in wet cotton, his eyes struggling to focus in the blinding light, and his stomach roiled uneasily in a way that foreboded nothing good.

At least he didn’t have a headache…

“Captain Rogers, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” someone said. It was a pleasant voice, cultured and vaguely accented, which a rich timber that suggested the speaker always had a pleasurable secret to share, if only you could be a good boy long enough to earn it.

Strain as he might to see beyond the klieg light, Steve couldn’t make out the figure to whom the voice belonged. Still, it was rude to ignore her, so he said, “I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment,” and waited, trying to calm his breathing and more than a little distressed to discover that he could not.

She tsked theatrically and stepped out of the shadows, her heels making a staccato counterpoint to his rapidly beating heart. She came to a halt at the foot of the bed so that Steve had to strain his neck up at an awkward, painful angle to look at her.  
“I was so hoping we might be friends, Captain. It would make my job easier.”

She said it as though he should have no other mission in life than to please her, and he began to understand that Dr. Mazik was dangerous in more ways than the ones that had been profiled in her dossier.

This suspicion hardened to certainty as she strolled up the length of the bed, dragging her fingertips lightly along his body as she came, stopping once to tease at the chest band restricting his breathing and a second time to press her pointer finger against the fragile apple of his throat, pressing just enough to make her point.

Then she slid her cold hand beneath the sheet, which is when Steve realized he was naked except for his boxers.

He tensed up but tried to give no other indication of his discomfort at her unwanted touch.

“Relax, Captain,” she soothed, leaning close. Her breath smelled faintly of roses and honey, and he wrenched his face away from hers, swallowing a dry heave and trying not to make a sound as her hand continued its unwanted exploration of his chest.

“You really are a fabulous physical specimen. As a doctor, it’s my responsibility to ensure that no harm comes to you. At least not until such time as I deem you ready for my tests.”

Steve shuddered inwardly to imagine what such tests might be. Outwardly, he tensed every muscle against the continuing unwanted touch, which now was tracing the lines of his abdominal muscles, just flirting with the waistband of his boxers.

He wouldn’t beg, certainly not this early in the game and not ever if he could help it, but he really, really wanted her to leave him alone. He preferred the echoing chill of the emptiness beyond the light to this utterly repulsive intimacy.

When her hand finished flirting and moved on to business, he couldn’t help the sound that came out of him, shoved from his throat by the sudden grip on his most intimate parts.

“Shhh-shhh-shhhh,” she murmured, as if he were an infant fussing in a cradle and not a grown man being assaulted by her. “I just need to get a little sample. There are, of course, other ways…”

He caught her glance off into the darkness, and he wondered what was out there.

“…but this way is far more pleasant, don’t you think?”

He didn’t want to think, in fact, not about the coldness of her fingers or the sure deftness of their motion on him nor the way he was inevitably rising to fullness under her touch.

Steve felt the tension in his stomach coagulate into a pushing urge, and he turned his head just in time to spew a thin stream of yellow bile.

“Oh, you poor dear,” she cooed, not ceasing her stroking for even a second. “Don’t you worry. We’ll get you all cleaned up.”

He hissed when a second hand joined the first, cupping his balls and kneading them experimentally. 

“Shhh-shhh-shhh,” she soothed again, speeding up the hand that was drawing unwanted sensation from him.

Steve felt the betraying heaviness low in his belly and closed his eyes tight, clenching his teeth against it, not wanting to give her the satisfaction she was so ruthlessly seeking.

But even his super strength couldn’t hold out forever against hydraulics, and despite his revulsion and shame, he felt himself coming, and he bit back furiously on the noise that wanted to leave him, a mingled sound of wrenching pleasure and gutting despair.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said, dangling a clear glass test tube half full of milky white spume in front of his face. “Good boy.” 

She patted his flaccid penis then, fondly, as a mother might pat her son on the head before sending him off to play, and Steve felt his stomach roll in protest again and turned away from her, ashamed of how dirty he felt, afraid of how empty he was, and trying desperately not to think of Tony and home.

After wiping him down quite clinically, as if she hadn’t just jacked him off, the doctor left the room with a breezy, “I’ll be back soon,” the clacking of her heels driving spikes of anxiety through Steve, who felt them like electric shocks.

He realized only belatedly that he was clenching his hands so hard that they were falling asleep. He forced himself to relax and go over what had just happened, ruthlessly suppressing the filthiness he felt to try to eke even an iota of hope out of it.

How long had he listened to her arrival, telegraphed by her shoes? How long had it taken her to cross the room when she left it? How tall was she? What was her approximate stride? Could he calculate the distance from his table to the door with that data? 

Had she said anything telling? Had she smelled like anything besides the sickly sweetness that had almost gagged him? 

Did she have callused hands? Did she have long fingernails? Did she…

Steve took a hard breath and held it, letting it out over a count of eight and repeating the process until he felt a little lightheaded, but his mind was clear.  
Then he started working on pushing his left thumb out of its socket to get free of the first of the restraints.

An eternity of strictly counted breaths later, Steve slid his bloody hand out of the wrist restraint. There was another strap across his forearms and another across his chest, but with his hand free, he could worry at the tension, slowly but surely feeling it give until he was able to slide his arm free. After that, it took little time to undo the right wrist strap, the strap across his upper chest, thighs, and at last his ankles and feet.

He removed the IV feed and flung it from him, hearing it clang dully against the chrome stand.

Apparently, there were no cameras out there in the darkness, or if there were, whoever was supposed to be watching was asleep at the monitor, because once Steve was free, he realized he’d have to take it slow. His head felt full of cotton, the table beneath him making a lazy sway. When he slid to the floor, his knees gave way, and he had to pull himself up against the table to regain his balance.

After an agonizing few minutes, Steve felt his strength returning a little—he wouldn’t be winning any races, but he thought he could probably walk to the door without falling on his face.

He proceeded to test his theory and was pleased to find that he was right.

He was less pleased to discover that the door was locked. He should’ve figured it would be, but he had been hoping for a little luck.

Clearly, it was going to be skill that got him out of this mess and nothing else.

Later, when he was debriefed, Steve would leave out a few details of his escape. He’d leave out the part about being raped of his DNA, telling them only, for security’s sake, that he thought the doctor might have gotten a sample from him while he was out of it.

He’d overlook the pain of his disjointed thumb, healed quickly though it was. He’d forget to mention how his hands, slippery with blood from struggling against his restraints, had trouble gaining purchase on the door handle. 

He failed utterly to mention how it felt to be weakened by whatever drug they’d been pumping into him, so weak that he couldn’t wrench the door handle out of its seating or shoulder or kick the door down.

He’d tell them that he killed the guard who came to investigate the noise he was making but not how long it took to drain the life out of him, a knee on his throat, another on his chest, at the end the man’s eyes begging, begging.

They didn’t need to hear that the dead guard’s shirt fit too tightly across his shoulders, his pants too wet with his urine to bother salvaging but that his boots were still warm from his feet and that Steve had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up on them.  
He also wouldn’t bother to talk about the lonely corridors he had wandered in search of an exit, holding his breath at every corner, aware that he’d have to use the gun he’d also stripped the dead guard of and hating it.

More endless than the maze he’d stumbled out of at last was the vast night desert around him when he finally emerged from the labyrinth to find a sky full of stars, so close he could have touched them had he dared, except he was all out of daring for that night.

Steve would not reveal how, exhausted, shivering with adrenaline let-down, probably in shock and definitely suffering some sort of weird withdrawal from the drugs they’d had him on, he’d swayed in place for precious minutes, listening to the alarm claxons from the bunker as if at a great distance from the place he was standing, staring at the expanse of stars and wondering how to get home.

Mostly, though, he was going to take to the grave how a blazing comet appeared, hanging brilliant and impossibly still in the western sky, a beacon for the lost to find solace and welcome.

He had stumbled in that direction, heedless of the sounds of pursuit at his back, sure in some primal part of him that they wouldn’t catch him, couldn’t, for he was being told that he was chosen, that he was allowed at last to go home.

Apparently, the S.H.I.E.L.D. recovery team—not Asherwald, Ortiz, and Okeke, they were dead, he learned, not having betrayed him at all—had found him a mile and a half from the bunker, passed out on his back behind a natural berm made by the shifting sand having piled over the carcass of an unfortunate ruminant of indeterminate species.

After medical had pumped him full of fluids to clear out the residuals of whatever weakening agent the enemy had used, he was allowed at last to go home, understanding that home meant, quite specifically, the Tower, where someone would be around—and here “someone” included Jarvis—24/7 to monitor him in case of any further adverse reactions to his ordeal.

The only reaction Steve wanted to have involved circumventing any monitoring, but then, he didn’t have a tech genius boyfriend for nothing.

It was just after midnight on Christmas morning when Steve entered the tower through a cleverly disguised maintenance door for which only he and Tony had the secret combination—a series of whistles that sounded suspiciously like the opening bars of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Tony had shared the secret with Steve when they’d still been sneaking around, but as far as Steve knew, Tony hadn’t had any reason to change the code.

He hoped it was the case, because he really wanted to surprise Tony—it was sentimental, sure, and romantic as hell.

Also, Steve wasn’t sure Tony would let him in if he knew that Steve was coming.

Steve had no trouble getting to Tony’s private floor, which should have been worrisome, but he was tired and a little sad and a lot eager to wrap himself around Tony and let his mind clear of any other thoughts.

Little mental alarms did go off when the door to their shared suite was unlocked, but Steve had come too far, was too close to being home to let the possibility of a rude shock deter him from opening the door.

What he saw stopped him in his tracks, tightened his breath and made him have to close his eyes: Tony, sprawled naked on his belly on the midnight blue sheets, sleeping face cradled on one bent arm, the other stretched out toward Steve’s side of the bed, clutching a little, as if holding on to hope.

During the endless debrief, Fury had wandered in long enough to say that he’d had to talk Tony out of causing an international incident by going full Ironman and unleashing his blazing wrath on half of Libya. Fury had made it sound like it had been a challenge to get Tony to agree to stand down. Steve hoped that was true. It made him warm in all kinds of squirmy ways to think of Tony in his righteous fury storming the bunker to save him.

That wasn’t quite the same warm, squirmy feeling Steve was having now; this feeling was decidedly less innocent.

Steve had showered after he’d passed Medical’s excruciatingly long and embarrassingly thorough check-up and changed into a set of street clothes he always kept on site for needful times.

These he stripped out of with silent, efficient haste, prowling toward the bed with all the stealth he’d learned over long years of practice. When he got to the foot of the bed, he slid a knee carefully between Tony’s spraddled legs and lowered himself until his mouth hovered over Tony’s ear.

“Merry Christmas,” he murmured, following his words with a nip to Tony’s earlobe, which earned a moan from him. Steve kissed his way down Tony’s neck, stopping to bite gently at the place where Tony’s shoulder and neck joined. This earned a deeper moan, and beneath him, Tony’s body shifted restlessly.

Steve dipped his pelvis, dragging his cock along the crease of Tony’s ass, and Tony spread his legs wider and breathed out a long, “Fuck, yeah,” and then turned over, wrapped his legs around Steve’s thighs, and pulled him down hard on top of him.

Where Tony’s thigh met his pelvis, he was hot and a little damp, and Steve’s cock was trapped there as Tony made little hitching motions with his hips, drawing a series of stuttering gasps out of Steve.

Then Tony snaked a hand between them to grip Steve firmly and a little rough, the way Steve usually liked it, except that this time Steve yelped and went still and closed his eyes against a sudden intrusive sense memory, which had Tony letting him go, dropping his legs to the bed and saying, “Hey,” so softly and gently that Steve felt his eyes get hot and damp beneath their lids.

“Tell me,” Tony asked, the please implied, and Steve shook his head and said, “Not now,” and lowered his mouth to Tony’s for a long, deep, searing kiss that refocused his energies until they were rutting against each other like teenagers and Steve realized he was breaking Tony’s name at every thrust and that the tears he’d tried to ignore were pouring down his face and then he was coming, Tony right there with him, wet splashes hot against his belly and Tony dipping a finger into his crack and driving another wrenching sound out of him before he collapsed, remembering only at the last moment to cant to the side to keep from crushing Tony, who was blowing like a racehorse after the Preakness.

There was nothing but blood thunder and hard breathing for a stretch and then Tony said, “Tell me,” again, so Steve did, picking around the difficult parts until Tony took his hand and said, “All of it,” in a voice soft and demanding and new in their history, as completely himself still as any he’d ever used, so Steve told him all of it haltingly, ashamed of his tears and his shuddering breath and the sickness roiling up in his belly and ashamed of being ashamed, knowing it wasn’t his fault but unable to stop feeling it anyway, and Tony right there listening, holding his hand, a single firm and unyielding point of contact grounding Steve, bringing him back to this room, this man, their mingled breath and the scent of spend on the air and the coolness of his wet belly and the distant susurrus of industrial air-conditioning and Tony silent beside him, not condemning in his quiet but biding, anchoring, everything.

And then when it was done, Tony rolled onto his side and wrapped his arm around Steve and rested his head against his chest and said, “I love you,” and it was, thank god, enough to let Steve’s breath out, let him sink into Tony’s hold and fall asleep and, please god, not dream.

The next morning when Steve awoke, somewhat disappointed to find himself alone, no sign or sense of Tony in their shared suite, and feeling somehow every year of his actual age, he got out of bed and, just to have someone to talk to, said, “Jarvis, what’s the weather out there?” 

Jarvis replied in his blandest, most insistently polite tone, “Sunny, thirty-two, chance of snow in New York; blinding dust over an obscure corner of northwestern Libya, reports of an earthquake and tongues of fire in the sky.”

Before Steve could process this unexpected information, he heard the telltale clang of suit removal and Tony’s voice announced, “Honey, I’m home,” just before he strolled through the door looking like a cat that had just bombed the canary to smithereens.

“Got me hellfire for Christmas, huh?”

“Same ol’, same ol’,” Tony agreed, wicked smile lighting up his face.

“And here I am with nothing to give you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Tony answered, sidling up close and wrapping an arm around Steve to grip his naked ass. “I’d say I’ve gotten the best Christmas present ever.”

“And already unwrapped,” Steve noted before Tony rendered him speechless.


End file.
